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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

Hi everyone, if you seen any of my other post about fonts you will see that I, like many others, have always felt that Linux font rendering was poor at best but with the newer versions of freetype (2.3.0) and above I think that for just plain font viewing that we might finally be catching up with Window$. Here are some recent (well 5 minutes ago ) screenshot comparisons.

I really hate to say this, since I know a lot of people take this stuff really seriously...but I never noticed any difference between the fonts in Linux and Windows.

I mean, I have the general feeling that something looks a little different when looking at a page on a Windows machine and a Linux one, but not enough to ever give it a second thought or make a big deal about it (I have actually spoken to some people who said they didn't want to switch to Linux until it's fonts were better).

It always makes me feel like I am missing something, but then again, maybe I should consider myself lucky I don't notice any problems.

I really hate to say this, since I know a lot of people take this stuff really seriously...but I never noticed any difference between the fonts in Linux and Windows.

I agree. The only difference I've ever found was in rendering proprietary fonts like Time$ New Roman (I HATE this font !!!) ... but that's what Bitstream Charter is for ... it looks better and it's free ! (and it will give you approximately the same words per page so teachers won't complain)

I think the default font rendering in Slackware looks MUCH better than anything Windows has. My fonts are smooth, clear and crisp. In Windows with ClearType the fonts look too close together and blurry to me, and without it it's just horribly jagged and hard to look at.

For me it's just the other way round - I get headaches with standard Linux anti-aliased rendered fonts, the same goes for Mac fonts or Cleartype rendering. Seems like my mind is only happy with the classic Windows-type rendering (byte-code enabled, aliased). And if I hadn't found a way to customize Slackware (or any Linux distro) to render fonts exactly like described in my Howto, I wouldn't have switched to Linux.

Daedra's Howto should include descriptions for both styles - everybody can choose what pleases his eyes most.

- It depends on your monitor which font or type of rendering looks good, much more than on the operating system; what's good for a tube might just be wrong for LCD.
- Readability and fanciness sometimes conflict with each other. The best fonts available are still the ones that come with TeX and LaTeX, when readability is the priority (this is for screen *and* DVI/print view).
- Sometimes a font that looks very nice on paper isn't readable on screen, at all, and a font good for the screen isn't acceptable in print.

Eg: I use monospaced fonts in my shell, switch off anti-aliasing on my old laptop, but in my desktop it's on. When I have to read long text on screen, I usually use programs like antiword, instead of reading the text in OOo or MS Word directly. But for printout I prefer fonts like the classic Times Roman (not: Times New Roman!), which is economic (many words fit into a relatively small space) and very readable, for longer documents; of course that's what it was designed to be: Printing newspapers at low cost, but not compromising readability. For letters Helvetica is a good choice, IMHO.
Sometimes, when I have to exchange documents with some pitiful Windows user, who just can't afford OOo, I use Microsoft fonts in OOo. To make them look good wasn't automatic, however, but now they are OK. (Although Times Roman in TeX is unparalleled, IMHO).

- It depends on your monitor which font or type of rendering looks good, much more than on the operating system; what's good for a tube might just be wrong for LCD.

gargamel

That is very true, I guess with all these post I should say that I never intended to say that the default font rendering in slackware was bad, in fact I think slackware has the best out of the box rendering of any current distribution. I just see a lot of posts all over different message boards about how can people render font's like mac/win and a lot of responses I read basically in a nutshell said you couldn't and with this post I just wanted to show that you in fact could.

XavierP,your tutorial http://brendan.sdf-eu.org/articles/a...sing_slack.php is great!I used many other tutorial and followed the instruction but things just don't work.However,my font is identical with Windows (which I like,whatever you'all said) after followed the instructions from your tutorial link.So,I think a howto is not necessary because we can follow the above tutorial.

P.S. I do think a little bit more explanation is necessary regarding how things work behind when we instruct the user to do a step.For example,the reason that I tell you to issue fontdir command is....

I still prefer the way Windows handles fonts. From the original post, I am very happy that the first set (Windows and Slack 12-current with no AA and bytecode interpreter enabled) look identical - however, a lot of us (me included) use LCD screens and cleartype from MS inproves readabilty 10-fold (at least). From the OP's screen shots, the linux ones still look quite far off. The fonts on the Linux ones look slightly thicker (bolder) and shorter than the MS ones. If you look at the very last comparison, if you look at the middle column, where the article's head line reads, "New Year", the 'e' are especially different from the MS screenshot of the same line.

It does seem to be getting better though, which I am happy to see () I would truly appreciate a comprehensive guide - I'm still not happy with the way that my fonts look in Slackware.

Yes, linux cleartype is not quite on par with windows but it very close trust me. I have also decided not to write the How-to because there didn't seem to be enough demand for it, and quite frankly I got a lot of people complaining it was a waste of time because they liked the default font rendering in slackware.